Chapter 28
28
DANTE
G abriel’s sprawling new mansion didn’t feel like home to me. It was his, not ours. But when we walked back through those doors with Celia, I felt like that could change. Wherever she was…that was my home.
There was tension between Gabriel and Celia. But it was complex tension. I could see the way Gabriel kept looking at her, as if he had realized for the first time that he could lose her.
And so, I felt tense too, because I knew how fucking stupid my brother could be.
What were the odds that we could pull this off? That we could keep Celia safe and make her happy?
There was the sound of paws, and Celia’s puppy tore through the room, ears bouncing. This time, she ran past Gabriel and right to Celia.
Gabriel smiled slightly.
Patricia came running after. “Your dog is a mess,” she complained as Celia scooped her up, the dog licking her face.
“She’ll be better once she has a name,” Gabriel said. He towered over Celia as he gently scratched the dog between her ears. “Without a name, how can she really feel like she’s part of the family?”
“She’ll still be incorrigible,” Celia said with a laugh. She set the dog down, and the it ran around our legs, greeting everyone exuberantly.
Gabriel looked disappointed. Maybe he felt that Celia wasn’t letting herself be tied to the dog, just like she wasn’t letting herself be fully tied to us yet.
“I need to have a planning meeting with my family,” Gabriel told Patricia. “Would you have breakfast sent into the dining room please?”
She gave him a fond look. It seemed as if it meant something to her to hear him describe us as our family. “Of course, Mr. Caruso.”
The four of us went into the dining room. Patricia came around and delivered everyone’s drinks, knowing without asking what we each preferred, including Celia’s cinnamon-dusted almond milk latte. The housekeeper knew what Celia’s favorite drink was. Soon, we all had a luxurious breakfast set out in front of us.
Celia took a sip of her latte. Her movements were graceful as she set it down gently on the table. before she asked, “How exactly are we going to kill my father?”
“As much as I look forward to killing him, the most important thing is making sure I—” Gabriel seemed to stumble. I wasn’t used to seeing him pause like that . “ You take over as heir.”
“Royal is dead,” Luca said, with obvious satisfaction. “That simplifies succession.”
“And Celia is married, which means technically, the leadership of the family would pass to her,” Gabriel confirmed. “In theory, if Mal were to be killed by a rival family, she would take their place. But in reality, we all know what the men are like in our world.”
“There will likely be challenges, though,” Luca finished. “It’s likely that your father will choose another successor, and the other families probably won’t look very kindly on the bloodbath that we would start killing our way through Mal’s picks.”
I shrugged. “I don’t mind the idea of killing to put Celia on the throne.”
Celia glanced my way and smiled. Luca looked surprised, but I’d caught the thrust of what Gabriel had promised her. He was trying to convince her that things could be different. I hoped like hell he could follow through.
“I would like to keep the killing to a minimum,” Celia said. She hesitated, then admitted, “I’d planned to get rid of Royal and my father. To strike when they didn’t expect it, so my father wouldn’t have the opportunity to name a successor besides Royal and have the other families acknowledge him.”
There would be a council of families. As dangerous as they all were to each other, they agreed when a new head of family was chosen and when successors were named.
“They won’t be able to meet that quickly,” I said. “Royal’s body is barely even cold.”
“The pieces that are left of it,” Luca said, with obvious satisfaction.
Celia looked over at him, and he shrugged unapologetically. “I had been planning to kill him myself, but it’s so fucking hot that you were the one who ended him. I can’t even be mad.”
She rolled her eyes. “I had the right to kill him. He has been my tormentor all these years.”
“Men like to show their love with violence,” Luca shrugged.
“I would like you to show your love by putting me on my father’s throne instead of having me kneel at yours.” Celia’s chin rose, and her gaze met each of ours in turn. “I have a lot to forgive. And if I’m in a position of weakness, how would we all know that I really forgive and move on?”
“Please,” Luca said. He touched the scar on his forehead where Celia had decked him with the shovel. “You might pretend, but I don’t think you’ve ever been in a position of weakness.”
“Right now, Mal Carmichael is still firmly seated on that throne,” Gabriel said. “Let me go through what I understand so far. Then we can plan together how we’ll take him down.”
Celia leaned back in her chair, cradling her mug in her delicate fingers. “We’re listening.”
“It’s bold of you to speak for Luca, who hardly ever listens,” Gabriel said wryly, with a glance at Luca, who shrugged and didn’t deny it.
Gabriel went on to explain, “Royal’s death seems to have left Mal unhinged. He seems to be reacting with some sense of paranoia. He hasn’t let anyone into the house.”
“I’ve got a man on the inside with the Harrow family,” Luca said. “The one I was using to feed Mal information. Mal should believe that while I was collecting his reports—he saw me as another one of his underlings. Unless Mal’s new paranoia extends to my guy, too, we can use that.”
“Since you were the primary point of contact, there is the possibility Mal will see him as tainted,” Gabriel said. “After all, he knows that you have always been on Celia’s side.”
Celia let out a soft breath of laughter. “It hasn’t felt that way.”
“Please. Luca and Dante have always been working for you,” Gabriel said.
“We can try getting some information to him to leak to Mal,” Luca said. “I just don’t know if it will take. What do we want him to believe?”
“We need to feed into his paranoia,” Celia said. “He’s always had a paranoid side, and the other heads of the family know it. So, if it looks like he’s acting erratically after Royal’s death, it won’t seem out of character, and it might give us an opening to replace him and make them happy about it.”
“He has always had a tendency to isolate himself,” Luca agreed. He had a good perspective after all the time he had spent with me working his way up in the family. “Obviously he’s already at war with the Dempsey family. But that still leaves the Kournikov and the Harrow family.”
Seeing my brothers and Celia plot together felt like a glimpse of who we could be together at our best.
“What if we helped him isolate himself?” I asked. “If it looked as if he were launching attacks on the other families, driven by his paranoia?”
“It would be ideal if we can get him to launch those attacks himself so that there’s no risk of the truth being discovered,” Gabriel said. “I wouldn’t want to end up with the other families turning on us instead.”
Celia tucked her hair behind her ear, a familiar gesture when she was nervous, and it made me wonder what it was she was thinking of. “If we were plotting something with the other families…if we could convince him of that…maybe we could get him to do something stupid.”
“And how are we going to convince him?” Gabriel asked, giving her a look as if he already didn’t like what he knew her answer was going to be.
“I could run back to him,” Celia said. “I could pretend that I saw you kill Royal and that I was afraid, that you were caging me…” Her lips turned up in amusement as she said the words. “And I could divulge our plans.”
“There’s no way in hell. That’s not fucking happening,” Luca said. “You going back into that house without stepping over Mal’s body is not going to happen.”
Gabriel held up his hand. “I don’t like the idea either,” he said, his tone more measured. “Celia, your father has never listened to you before. I don’t think he’s going to listen to you now.”
“He would if I convinced him that he was getting information from me that I didn’t want him to have,” Celia said.
“There’s no way in hell,” Luca repeated, as if the very thought of Celia in danger was turning him into a malfunctioning robot.
“I don’t want him to launch an attack that we aren’t able to control,” Celia said. “He won’t trust Luca and Dante. There’s no one else that can get close to him.”
“And why exactly do you need to make sure those attacks are under your control?”
Celia met Gabriel’s eyes. She seemed to struggle with an internal debate before she said openly, “I have a list of targets. And I have a list of people to protect.”
“When I was hunting for you,” Gabriel said. “Kara seemed very protective of you.”
“I have secrets I can’t tell you yet, Gabriel,” Celia told him. “Because they’re not my secrets.”
“But you will, eventually?” he asked her.
“I have a story I really want to tell you eventually,” she told him, and the smile that lit her face made her even more beautiful. “I know how much you like trying to get my secrets. But you’ll have to wait for this one.”
“I want to know it,” Gabriel said. “But I can wait. Until you’re ready.”
I knew this had to do with those girls of hers that she had aligned herself with. I wanted for us to be the ones who always protected and cared for her now, but I was glad that she had her girls. She needed to continue to have them.
We finished our plotting, agreeing on what we needed Mal to believe, but there were still uncertainties in how we’d get that information to him in a way that he would accept.
When Celia and Luca headed out through the doors into the garden, following Celia’s puppy, the sounds of their laughter reached back to us.
I wanted to go with her, but I lingered with Gabriel. He’d spent so much time alone. I didn’t want him to keep feeling alone.
“It was good of you to get her a puppy,” I said, trying to put the most positive spin on it I could because I wasn’t sure what Gabriel had really been thinking when he gifted her the poor puppy.
I wasn’t sure when he’d started to fall in love with her. He kept his emotions locked away. And yet, I didn’t doubt that it had happened.
Gabriel leaned in the doorway, his hands in his pockets, watching them. “If I weren’t here…I bet she’d name that dog.”
“I think she was more angry with me for staying away than she was ever at you for anything you did, Gabriel.” Saying the words out loud let something unspool in my chest. She’d been glad I was alive, too, but that didn’t take away the hurt that I could have caused.
If I’d been able to get to her—even if there had been years when I couldn’t reach her—there had been the last few months working with Luca. There had been chances to defy Gabriel and Luca and their plans—to lay everything out for her. It would have been wild and reckless and an act of love that she deserved.
“Still. She told me…” he trailed off. “I wish she would name the dog. Then I’d believe she really intended to stay.”
“So, everything about putting her on her father’s throne instead of taking it for yourself. Do you mean that or is it just if she’s going to stay?”
Gabriel’s jaw flexed. “What are we going to do without her, Dante? If we put her on her father’s throne, if she’s powerful…she’ll still be in danger. We’re really going to stand back and watch?”
“Of course not. Even if we don’t have her, Gabriel, we’ll back her. We’ll serve her instead of having her serve our purposes.”
Gabriel gave me a look that I couldn’t read.
“There are no guarantees if we do that.” I had to admit the truth to him to get him to really hear me. “But if we aren’t worthy of her…we’ll never really have her. We have to take the risk that after she gets what she wants, we don’t get her.”
Gabriel looked troubled.
I clapped him on the shoulder. He looked at me in surprise. I hadn’t touched my brother for a long time except for when we were fighting.
“For now, she’s here, and we have work to do.”
For now, things were almost the way they were meant to be.
I just hoped like hell the four of us could make it the rest of the way.